Epiphanies
by cuppacuppajoe
Summary: A series of vignettes studying Rory and Logan's emotions, thoughts, realizations about their relationship. Beginning postLet Me Hear Your Balalaikas Ringing Out.


**Author's Note:** I don't know what this is. Whether it will evolve into an actual story with chapters; whether it will end up being AU or just fill in the gaps of the storyline as we know it. I've always wanted to explore, and just write about, what Rory and Logan might have been experiencing circa LMHYBRO, to BR, to SCPP, to Partings. So many epiphanies on both their parts, but so little revealed to us as viewers. So think of this as a series of character studies, for now. If you like, let me know.

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_1. Epiphany in Blue_

He saw blue.

Behind his closed eyelids, blue veins and shadows. Brightening to the cyan of the sea on a clear summer day in Fiji. Yasawa island, in June. (When she's happy, that is.)

Blue, blue, blue, blue.

Chanting, the waves rolling and crashing in his head, in rhythm with the pushing and pulling. Blue.

The Delft blue of those miniature ceramic Dutch houses in the library at Hartford. Lined up in a row, the hue on the rooftops an impassioned indigo. Shiny, blazing (angry?) against the light from the window. Or the calm antique azure painted in filligrees and curlicues on his porcelain bath tile. So pale, nearly transparent, not there. No—blue, just blue.

Joni Mitchell _Blue_ (does she have that CD?), where she sings _I'm selfish and I'm sad-now I've gone and lost the best baby that I ever had-I wish I had a river I could skate away on-I would teach my feet to fly-it's coming on Christmas._ Christmas blue, winter cold.

He was almost there, he was straining to make it, before the blue fades out, like one too many drops of water on watercolor. Washed away. No, please, please, stay blue. He inhaled the musty reek of the lumpy sofa, vaguely remembering its faded upholstery as he stumbled into it five minutes ago. It might have been blue.

A cry, and his eyes opened, the sound jarring him like a string instrument decidedly out of tune. It didn't have the right lilt to it. Looking down, he saw—not the right color, either. Brown. Wrong color, wrong eyes. Wrong girl, her face pixelating in front of him, as if rearranging itself to try and set things aright. But the blue had disintegrated, a wisp in his mind he could not resurrect to a wave, the blue that he wished could just engulf him. It would never be right.

He gagged and grunted off of her, fumbling like the pathetic drunk that he was to the nearest bathroom, retching in the toilet, heaving until he couldn't feel any emptier. Then he carefully lay down on the cold marble, staring at the white flourescent light overhead until his vision turned blotchy with black—and blue—spots. Like bruises.

"Logan? Where did you go?" A woman's voice floated from the room, slightly slurred. Sounding fretful. Probably just annoyed, really, at his abrupt…disengagement. He didn't know her. Except that she had brown eyes. He didn't know where he was. But at this wretched moment at last, he knew exactly where and what he wanted to be. The realization left him strangely calm, in contrast to the rumbling bass and the fumbling bodies reverberating against his back from the ongoing party a floor below.

He couldn't escape the blue in her eye.

Hell, he tried. And he thought he succeeded. A drink in his hand here, a random fuck there, and she fell away, loosening her hold on him. Her hand was the first casualty. He could no longer remember how it felt. How had her palm mold into his; did their fingers fit well, snugly? Her hair. Was the brown tinged with red? Or gold. Anecdotes became trivial, the dates and context misplaced, and he found himself—quite proudly—forgetting snippets of the dialogue in movies that he had watched with her at least half a dozen times. Their last argument—and whatshisface, Jack?—finally inconsequential. Coffee was just coffee, no longer having the mystical power to conjure up some random memory of her furrowed brow as she read her book; the curve of her shoulder, hunched ever so slightly. In the bedlam of parties, tequila-induced comas, and non-coffee-drinking women he pursued, she virtually disappeared.

Until all that was left of her was the blue in her eye.

And the irony of it, he smiled to himself sardonically, is that the more he tried to obliterate this one last remnant of her, there evolved, to his frustration, the increasingly desperate desire to hold on to it. He couldn't—and then wouldn't—let it go. _Just let me keep this one last, tiny thing_, some part of him pleaded.

He started dreaming in blue.

How did this happen?, he had asked himself the few times he felt lucid enough to think about her, his once college _girlfriend_. (How quaint, how trite, the Logan of old would have mocked.) He just wanted to return to how things were: predictable, controllable. No bouts of possessiveness over a girl, no dramatic confrontations in bars. He believed he could overcome the irrational need to touch her constantly, just as he could douse the irrational hurt he felt when she voiced her dissatisfaction with their—his—lifestyle… when she neither followed nor called him when they parted ways at the bar. Logan Huntzberger, _hurt?_ Ah, he's had enough of this…_experiment_. It was veering out of control. She was making him fall…_where?_ He didn't know, and didn't want to find out. It was time to move on. As she apparently had.

And so his days reverted to how they were easily enough, to what it was before she entered his life with that stunt of a jump and her hand clasping his to her heart. The same meaningless conversations with the same friends; the same parties and sub-parties with the same brand of liquor; heck, the same sex with the same women. But somehow, it was different.

He was irrevocably changed.

He felt different. And he couldn't put a finger on it for the longest time, this persistent sense of…of…_nothingness_. At first it seeped between the cracks of his consciousness, nagging him during those rare moments when he was by himself. And the more he crammed the void with the blonde, loud, black, brown, reckless, noise, the more he felt empty. Another irony. Now it all but overwhelmed him, lying at that moment on the bathroom floor. Her blue was all he had.

_Nothingness, nothing. _Nothing, except for the blue.

He never felt this way before. But neither had he ever had a girlfriend. That too was a first. A girlfriend with whom he had been…_happy_? His mind struggled with the naive simplicity of the idea, the emotion. Yet his heart virtually burst and cackled at the thought of it, blue fire coursing through vessels and arteries.

He was happy. _Yes, that was it. _

She had told him she loved him, she and her blue eyes. (Reminiscing, he shut his eyes and curled up on his side with his cheek against the marble. The warmth of her neck as he remembered it against his palm was a contrast to the cold.) He had felt the perfect contentment of falling asleep and waking up in her arms, that he now understood, finally—like complementary colors illuminating each other to stark relief—that he was unmistakeably and utterly miserable without her.

(Was it better to have not been so happy, so as to remain ignorant of this loneliness?)

"Huntzberger!" The doorknob shook. A muffled voice with a heavy Australian accent came through the wall, registering remotely in his subconscious. The voice always sounded uncharacteristically worried of late. "Are you alive, mate?"

Never more alive again, than at that moment.

_Rory, I love you,_ he murmured, rolling the words off his tongue, bringing the simple truth into being for the first time. Trying it out for size. In his mind's eye, her face ever so gradually morphed into clarity: the dent in her chin, the flush on her cheek, her broad forehead. In the sunlight, he saw that the highlights in her hair were indeed red. As if in response to his tentative admission, she was, once again, no longer just blue.


End file.
